Sunday, January 3, 2010

drop memory

One and a half years is what it takes. Maybe less. There is an end to grief after all. There can be lessening both of pain and of guilt. All the things they said about time were true, up to a point.

If I hadn't separated every thread of my loss and noted its colour, if I hadn't thought and thought about death, if I hadn't done all of what I have for the last 18 months, perhaps time would have done a different job.

A year ago, new year's eve: at Vasanta Vihar, Chennai. Something on the train made me want to spend that new year there, solitary, in K's place. As it happened, there was a New Year party at the place next door, and I could hear all the yowling and determined celebration. But in that one day, everything fell away - all the confusion, cotton-woolliness of the last six months. Places do have their spirit and K's was strong there.

That day, that transition, like a flame cupped through the year has brought me to now.

There's nothing more to be said. There was a person, now there isn't. There was a mass of emotion and incomprehension. That has now been dropped.